


may the tides carry you home

by chidorinnn



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Nohr | Conquest Route, Past Character Death, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:09:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27582536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chidorinnn/pseuds/chidorinnn
Summary: Family has never come easily to Azura. If it did by some chance grace her, then it never stayed for long. All she has left is a lost, forgotten kingdom buried under the waves.What would Mikoto say, if she could see her now? A girl who turned her back on her family — threw all those olive branches Ryoma had extended towards her back in his face, absconded with that which Hinoka holds most dear, proved the worst of Takumi’s fears about her right, betrayed Sakura in the worst way possible. She’s here, back in her previous kingdom, surrounded by family and yet unable —refusing— to claim any of them as such out of a kind of an ancient, deep-rooted fear that has refused to let her go. And for what? Petty revenge? Some foolish notion of justice? To pointlessly cling to a ruined home that she can never get back?—but she will fight for that home. It's all she has left.
Relationships: Aqua | Azura & Camilla, Aqua | Azura & Leon | Leo, Aqua | Azura & Mikoto, Aqua | Azura & My Unit | Kamui | Corrin, Aqua | Azura & Ryoma
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9
Collections: Fire Emblem Writer's Zine





	may the tides carry you home

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Fire Emblem Writer's Zine! A  
> A big big thank you to [Dameceles](https://twitter.com/Dameceles), [WingBerry](https://twitter.com/itswingberry), and [Charley](https://twitter.com/floccesyranch) for organizing this!
> 
> Check out the art that goes with this piece [here](https://thefrogattack.tumblr.com/post/634903981382057984/finally-able-to-post-the-piece-i-did-for-the-fire) :D

Nestra falls.

It happens in a chorus of screams, a path of blood torn through countless dancers and songstresses that had no part in the pain that Garon had been forced to endure. Camilla and Leo watch without a shred of emotion evident on their faces. This, they know, is their father: to get in his way is to risk sharing his victims’ fate.

This is not the Garon that her mother had married. Her memories of him are sparse, but there were certain qualities in him that her mother had valued: kindness, gentleness, everything that the man before her is not. The evidence is there — in the way he was so clearly affected by her mother’s song and the magic within her pendant.

Corrin’s hands are on her shoulders, gentle yet grounding. “You’re not hurt, are you?” she asks, eyes wide and face just a few shades too pale for her to completely mask just how jarring this turn of events has been for her — as if such horrors lie so far beyond the scope of imagination that Corrin hadn’t considered them at all.

(If it were anyone else but Corrin, Azura might have resented her a little.)

“I’m fine,” she answers. Her voice does not shake, because this is far from the worst she’s endured and the world has always held little sympathy for her troubles.

A little ways away, Leo meets her eyes — shrewd and calculating, as if he can see right through her — but Azura has had more than enough experience building fortresses around herself.

Corrin flinches with every scream, despite her attempts to hide her fear. It’s a side effect of growing up loved, albeit isolated — surrounded by people who cared for her, wanted to be with her for very little reason at all and asked for nothing in return. It would have been nice to grow up like that, maybe — but Azura’s long trained herself out of wanting such things.

Nestra’s performers fall, one by one to her stepfather’s axe, and Azura feels nothing.

* * *

(Ten years ago, Azura arrived in Hoshido flanked by soldiers, with her hands bound together in thick rope that chafed at her wrists. Her mother was dead and her stepfather had gone somewhere she couldn’t reach, and one of those soldiers had taken her mother’s pendant and he _wouldn’t give it back_.

None of it showed on her face when she was presented before Hoshido’s queen. Her aunt, she realized, didn’t look very much like her mother at all — Queen Mikoto’s hair was dark, so dark that you could easily mistake her for Hoshidan, but her eyes were a familiar shade of golden-brown, rimmed with red as they were. Then, she looked to the soldiers that flanked her and asked in a deep and rasping voice, “Was there anything else?”

The soldier who stole her mother’s pendant retrieved it from the satchel strapped to his thigh, before dropping it in Mikoto’s outstretched hands. “Leave us,” said Mikoto, her eyes narrowing at the pendant into something that was not quite anger.

“But milady—” protested one of the soldiers.

“Please,” Mikoto whispered, tiredly, as she curled her fingers over the pendant and gave them a feeble smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Without further argument, the soldiers bowed and obeyed.

When they were gone, Mikoto’s face _crumpled_. “So the rumors were true…” she said in a shaking voice. “Arete… she…”

—and maybe it was that there has been no time to stop and think about all that had happened. Maybe it was the fact that this is the first time she’d heard her mother’s name spoken aloud in days, but Azura was powerless to stop the tears that flooded her eyes, then, as Mikoto fell to her knees and pulled her into her arms. “You’ll be safe here,” Mikoto told her through tears of her own. “I promise.”)

* * *

Garon’s crusade ends bloodily, but anticlimactically.

It’s hard to define what constitutes to a victory here — but the violence is over one moment, when it had persisted before. It will take ages to get the bloodstains out of her dress, but Azura’s had more than enough practice with this.

Her stepfather’s gaze lingers on her for one long moment, and it’s nothing like she remembers. There’s a void there, somewhere behind his eyes — as damning as it would have been had he dissolved into the worst monsters of her nightmares. “You, girl…” he says in a low, crackling voice as he points to her.

It’s deeply ingrained instinct that snaps her to attention, compels her to _move_. It’s an instinct that doesn’t originate from her childhood in Nohr; she’d been used to hiding, back then, fading into the background and fabricating _invisibility_. It was in Hoshido where people would watch her endlessly, where one misstep could lead to ruin when Mikoto was not watching.

“Yes, Father?” she responds, holding herself very still.

His brow wrinkles. “There is a… tonic. Leo knows. Bring it to me.”

She bows deeply, and that too is another instinct lingering from her time in Hoshido — but he says nothing more, and she takes it as a victory when she’s free to leave.

Her brother lingers just a few paces away from Camilla, Elise, and Corrin, all three clustered together. Corrin’s sobbing, her shoulders hitching even through her attempts to regulate her breathing into some semblance of calm; Elise’s arms are wrapped snugly around her, while Camilla holds her hand gently.

“She’s getting better at this,” says Leo. “It was worse, before. She actually argued with Father.” And what he leaves unsaid is: maybe it’s not a good thing after all, that this is something they’ve all become comfortable with.

Azura sighs. “I was expecting Father to be… volatile,” she admits, “but not like this.”

Leo smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Then you have much to learn, Sister. Or… perhaps you’re already well aware.”

It’s not a pleasant history — definitely not one worth rehashing with a brother that she can barely claim as such. It’s a history that has to have ended only shortly after Azura had left the kingdom, for Corrin to be reacting this way. This kind of bloodshed has long seeped into Nohr’s very bones — if it wasn’t Garon’s doing before, then it was someone acting in his name. Not even her remaining siblings’ attempts at building a more peaceful Nohr can erase that legacy. “Father’s asking for a tonic,” she says.

Leo sighs. “Yes, it’s getting to be about that time.”

—and as he turns to leave, he says: “That was a nice performance, though. It’s a shame that it had to end so prematurely.”

* * *

(Despite everything, Mikoto was no mother to her.

It was expected, but it still stung all the same when days passed and Mikoto was swept up in Hoshido’s court — so different from Nohr’s, with no knives pointed at her back that Azura could see. The kingdom reeled from the murder of its king and the kidnapping of one of its royal children; Azura, for all intents and purposes a princess of Nohr, had no place here.

What quickly became apparent, in the days she took to settle into her new role as a political hostage, was that Azura was no princess here. It was a relief, that there was no need to impress or win the support of anyone who was not Mikoto — but though her hands were no longer bound, there were still soldiers at her heels and dozens of eyes upon her. They would do nothing to her, not when a simple declaration of Mikoto’s protection stood in their way, but it would be foolish to deny that at least some of them wished to see the same ruin to her that they’d do to King Garon, if they had the chance.

—and Mikoto still would not call Azura her niece. She would be kind to her when they were alone, in private, but the kindness stopped at politeness when they were forced to interact in public. Outside, Azura stopped being Mikoto’s sister’s daughter and became instead the displaced Nohrian princess deserving of every bit of hatred and scorn born from the murder of Hoshido’s king and the kidnapping of one of its princesses.

It made sense, though it stung to admit it — Mikoto’s grip on Hoshido’s throne was tenuous, when the court reminded her daily that the ideal scenario would be for the crown prince to ascend. It would ruin her, if it were to come to light that she had blood ties to Nohr’s throne.

And worse: it wasn’t like Azura had anyone here to count on, besides Mikoto.

So she held her tongue and kept her gaze trained to the floor. Little by little, she fell into a routine. Nothing was expected of her, besides simply remaining quiet and out of the way as Mikoto struggled to pack away her grief and pick up the pieces of a kingdom left in shambles. There were gardens to explore, new foods to eat, and no knives at Azura’s back. The guards tasked with watching her stood at a respectable distance, and let her be.

It wasn’t home — because without her mother, nothing would truly be a home — but for a long while, it was enough.)

* * *

Corrin falls asleep that night with her head resting in Camilla’s lap, her eyes finally dry. It’s an oddly peaceful image, out of character for what she remembers of the majority of her siblings in Nohr; perhaps it’s not a coincidence after all, that none of the ones remaining had ever been deliberately cruel or unkind.

Xander, the eldest, was rarely permitted to venture beyond King Garon’s immediate grasp. Camilla had been kept apart by her mother, the both of them more focused on improving themselves than tearing their peers down. Leo, just a boy then, had been far too focused on his studies to be involved in much else. Elise had been too young — what was the worst someone like her could do, besides serving as a pawn in whatever schemes her mother may have concocted?

—but the smile Camilla gives her then is a gentle one, kind in the way Ryoma’s had once been. That alone makes it easy to go to her and sit next to her. “How have you been holding up?” asks Camilla, softly. She asks it in such a way that Azura feels no compulsion to answer immediately — Camilla will not be angry if she takes her time with this. It’s a kind of patience she never thought she’d see in any of her stepfather’s children.

“As well as I can be expected, I suppose,” answers Azura. “It’s… strange, to be back.”

Camilla chuckles. “I can only imagine… but you’re doing well so far.”

It’s… different, when Camilla says it. They’re words fit for a parent, and they shouldn’t have to belong to Camilla. “Am I really?”

“You are.” Camilla takes a strand of Azura’s hair, and teases it between two of her fingers. “Corrin told me a little, but not everything. You were raised a prisoner, weren’t you? In Hoshido.”

“I…” Azura starts. “Yes, that’s correct.”

Then Camilla’s hand falls — down from Azura’s hair, to her hands resting in her lap. “That was unworthy of them.”

She thinks back, abruptly, to that last peaceful morning at home — to Takumi, raising his voice in the marketplace, shouting words that she’s heard countless times throughout her life — and Corrin shouting right back at him. Ryoma, Hinoka, Sakura — none of them would say a word when Takumi got like this — but would Camilla, were anyone in Nohr to do the same? Would Xander, Leo, Elise?

“No, it’s…” says Azura, softly. “It’s fine. It was justified.”

“No, it was not,” says Camilla, firmly, as she squeezes Azura’s hand. “Their princess was kidnapped, and that was wrong of our father. That did _not_ give them the right to treat you as they did.”

… come to think of it, Hinoka had said something similar about Corrin, hadn’t she? And she’d been so hurt when Corrin had fought her in that tower… Would Camilla feel the same way, if it had been Azura fighting against her?

“It wasn’t all bad,” says Azura, and she doesn’t know why. “Lady Mikoto wanted us all to be a family… and for me to call her children my siblings.”

“Tell me about them,” says Camilla. She says it gently, but there’s something off about it — like anything that Azura says in response could be used against them later.

“I’m sure Corrin’s already told you plenty.”

“Yes, but she knew them for a matter of days. You knew them for _years_.”

“Well…” says Azura, slowly. “What did Corrin tell you, then?”

Camilla chuckles. “That they reminded her of the four of us, mostly,” she says. “They were kind… and they were patient with her, even when she didn’t remember her time with them.”

Azura can’t help but smile at that. “It makes sense that she’d get that impression. Still…” Something like fondness blooms in her chest, and it shouldn’t. She could never have been one of them, no matter what Mikoto and Ryoma had said before all of this.

“I realize that I haven’t spent nearly enough time with Xander to say for sure,” she says, “but it’s Sakura that reminds me the most of him — or at least, how he used to be.” She tries not to wonder what it would be like, to be back in Hoshido right now — and there is much she cannot say in that moment. She cannot tell Camilla that when she closes her eyes, she can almost picture Ryoma next to her, and not her. She cannot tell her that the sheer fervor of Elise’s love for her family rivals only Hinoka’s. “Corrin was right about one thing, though: Takumi and Leo really are similar. You wouldn’t think it, because their personalities are so different… but I think they approach things in very similar ways.”

Camila smiles, softly, and then releases Azura’s hand to wrap her arm around her shoulders. “It sounds like you miss them a lot.”

That can’t be true. How can she miss a relationship that never existed in the first place?

“Perhaps you’re right,” Azura lies.

* * *

(The first of the Hoshidan royal family to seek Azura’s company, besides Mikoto, was Ryoma.

It was difficult to assess what kind of person he was, at first. He hardly smiled, and there was a certain ice in his eyes that rendered him unapproachable. It was expected — he was in mourning for a lost father and sister, just like the rest of this kingdom.

But as she sat in the gardens one day, watching as he moved from kata to kata, his gaze drifted to her and he asked far too casually, “Would you like to join me?”

He wasn’t supposed to talk to her like this — the last thing anyone in this kingdom needed was a Nohrian princess commiserating with the crown prince — and so Azura took that as her cue to leave. She bowed hastily before lifting her skirt and running out of there as fast as her legs would carry her. There were people watching her, of course — there would always be people watching her here — but she paid them no mind as she searched the palace halls for Mikoto.

Later that day, at dinner, Ryoma slid into the seat next to his mother. Azura nodded to him politely, as she was expected to do, and prayed that he wouldn’t bring up the incident.

“I’m sorry for earlier,” he said anyway. “I realize I put you in a very awkward position. It’s just that…” Azura stared pointedly at Mikoto, who smiled serenely (traitorously) in return. “I don’t know if you noticed, but there were people watching you back there. Too closely, if you were to ask me.”

_But I didn’t ask you_ , Azura very wisely did not say. “I’m aware,” she replied instead.

“I thought if, perhaps…” Ryoma trailed off, his eyes averting downward. “I thought if they could see that _I_ trusted you, then they would come to trust you, too.”

… that wasn’t right. She’d hardly said two words to him since she arrived — on what foundation did any _trust_ between them lie?

“That’s very kind of you, Ryoma,” said Mikoto, “and you’re right. There is no reason Azura should be so mistrusted in her own home.” She turned to Azura. “Would you like to be trained alongside him?”

That sent a sudden jolt of terror shooting through her chest. She’d been asked to “train” with siblings before, and all that had ever amounted to was a controlled environment where her siblings could hurt her and face no consequences for it.

Mikoto had to have known, because her next words were: “I’ll be right there with you. If nothing else, to ensure that whatever sparring matches may occur there remain fair.”

“But Mother, I wouldn’t—”

“I know you wouldn’t think of treating her in that way, Ryoma,” said Mikoto, patiently, “but you are not the only one who trains there. Am I correct?”

Ryoma bowed his head. “Yes, Mother.”

So Azura showed up in the gardens the next day, ready to train. Ryoma was there, endlessly patient with her as she fumbled through the same katas he could do in his sleep. Weeks later, Hinoka would join them — then Takumi, some years later — and then Sakura.

—and all the while, Mikoto would watch serenely as this small, broken family of hers came together.)

* * *

It’s only later that night that she can finally carve out a small slice of alone time. She spends it singing, wading into the water of the lake just a little ways outside the city. It’s warm in Nestra, but not as warm as it would have been at this time of the year in Hoshido.

… gods. She was a fool, to think that she would never miss Hoshido. This lake is ice cold and murky, nothing at all like the one in her favorite garden back at the palace. Mikoto is not here, and she will never come back; it’s pointless to mourn someone who would never truly acknowledge Azura as _hers_ , not in the way that it mattered. But Azura’s mother is long gone and for years, she had no one else.

What would Mikoto say, if she could see her now? A girl who turned her back on her family — threw all those olive branches Ryoma had extended towards her back in his face, absconded with that which Hinoka holds most dear, proved the worst of Takumi’s fears about her right, betrayed Sakura in the worst way possible. She’s here, back in her previous kingdom, surrounded by family and yet unable — _refusing_ — to claim any of them as such out of a kind of an ancient, deep-rooted fear that has refused to let her go. And for what? Petty revenge? Some foolish notion of justice? To pointlessly cling to a ruined home that she can never get back?

She sings and she falls, deeper and deeper and deeper until the water stops rushing and her feet touch cold grass. Quietly, something within her settles.

She’s home… but she is not alone. Behind her is Corrin, lost and confused and so, so ignorant.

“Tell me…” says Azura, plaintively. “Why are you here?”

* * *

(Then one day, Azura followed Mikoto to a large lake in one of the gardens. There were no guards that accompanied them, and so Azura was allowed to hold her aunt’s hand as they walked together. “How much did your mother tell you about our old home?” asked Mikoto.

“Um…” Azura mumbled. “Only that it’s long gone… that it’s been cursed somehow, and that we can never go back.”

Mikoto hummed. “I can see why she’d phrase it that way. We certainly can’t go back home as we knew it, at the time that we left… but that doesn’t mean that it’s gone entirely.” She lifted her skirt and stepped into the water, before turning back and extending her arm towards Azura. Azura blinked at it once, twice, before lifting her skirts as well and taking her hand.

Together, they waded deeper and deeper until the water reached up past Azura’s chest, and then some more. “It’s all right,” said Mikoto, squeezing her hand gently just as the water began to bob under Azura’s nose. “We’ll be fine.”

Then, they fell. It was hard to define it as such, when it was water rushing around them and not air — but clashing colors twisted and turned about them, turning her stomach until she closed her eyes against it all.

When it was over, her feet touched cold grass. Mikoto did not release her hand.

“This…” said her aunt, “… is Valla. And you must _never_ utter that name outside this place. Understand?”

Azura nodded — but there was a certain sharpness in Mikoto’s eyes that had never been there in her mother’s, when speaking of their old home. Maybe that sharpness would be there in her mother’s eyes, if they’d had the chance to come here together.

“You must _promise_ me, Azura,” said Mikoto, with steel in her voice.

“I promise,” said Azura, quietly.

Mikoto squeezed her hand then, the tension bleeding out of her shoulders. “Good. I apologize for the fuss, but that’s part of the curse laid on this place, you see? We can never utter its name, or we will be spirited away.”

And then, they walked through fields of cold, still grass and ruins of white stone. There was no breeze in the air, no music in the wind — and all of it was familiar because her mother used to tell her stories about this place.

Her mother used to call it _home_. Azura didn’t remember it herself — she was barely a year old when they left — but between legends of old, old dragons and fragmented descriptions of palaces made of white stone, she could almost picture what sort of place this once was.

—and as she walked together with her aunt, in this ruined kingdom that was once theirs, she _wanted_ to call it home.

So for the moment, she clung to the only person remaining that she could call _family_. This moment would fade once they returned to the palace; for all that Mikoto wanted Azura to consider her children family, she would never call Azura her _niece_. But Azura held on anyway. “Can we come back?” she asked, voice shaking.

“Yes, darling,” said Mikoto. “Of course… but you must remember: this is our home no longer. Our home is on the surface, now. In Hoshido. Someday… I’ll tell you the story of what transpired here.”

Therein lay the difference: Mikoto had abandoned this place — but it was not lost, so Azura would come back. She would come back as many times as it took, to see their old home restored. She would do it with or without Mikoto’s blessing.

It was the only place she truly had to call _home_ , so she would fight for it with all she had.)


End file.
